Moorhead C. Kennedy Jr., sporting a darkish swimsuit and a inexperienced polka-dot tie, was working at his desk within the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the morning of Nov. 4, 1979, when a Marine burst into the hallway exterior his workplace.
It was a tense interval in Iran: A revolution to overthrow the shah was escalating. Mr. Kennedy, a profession Overseas Service officer, was filling in for the economics counselor, the embassy’s third-ranking diplomat, who was away on household go away.
“I used to be very excited about seeing a revolution in progress,” Mr. Kennedy later recalled. “It was a really fruitful time till, unexpectedly, I heard a shout from the Marines, ‘They’re coming over the wall!’ After which an entire new expertise started.”
Supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took Mr. Kennedy and 51 others hostage. They had been held for 444 days and subjected to psychological and bodily abuse, together with mock executions. The worldwide disaster upended Jimmy Carter’s presidency and helped foment within the West a permanent mistrust of the Islamic world.
Following the discharge of the hostages simply after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president in January 1981, Mr. Kennedy emerged as one of the vital recognizable characters of the episode — partially as a result of his spouse, Louisa Livingston Kennedy, had been a spokeswoman for households of the hostages, however extra so as a result of he had give up the Overseas Service and change into a fierce critic of U.S. overseas coverage.
Mr. Kennedy died on Could 3 in Bar Harbor, Maine. He was 93. The reason for his demise, at an assisted dwelling facility, was problems of dementia, his son Mark stated.
In speeches, interviews and his 1986 e book, “The Ayatollah within the Cathedral: Reflections of a Hostage,” Mr. Kennedy contended that the American overseas coverage institution had taken an imperial, our-way-or-the-highway posture within the Center East, and particularly in nations ruled by Islamic regulation, which he had studied in school and regulation faculty.
“With regards to overseas affairs, the very last thing on the planet an American is prepared to do is to suppose or to attempt to suppose what it will be wish to be a Soviet, to be an Arab, to be an Iranian, to be an Indian,” Mr. Kennedy stated on Harold Hudson Channer’s public-access TV present in 1986. “And the result’s that we consider the world as a projection of ourselves, and we expect that others have to be considering alongside the strains we’re considering. And once they don’t, we’re troubled by it.”
Mr. Kennedy thought the Iranian hostage episode was an omen for future terrorist assaults.
“The weather within the Arab world and in Iran are reacting in opposition to us by way of one other type of conflict — a low-intensity conflict known as terrorism,” he informed Mr. Channer. “And I believe it’s a manner of attempting to make us perceive, or no less than remember, that they’ve a unique viewpoint.”
Mr. Kennedy’s ideas on U.S. overseas coverage had been partly formed by discussions together with his captors. Made up principally of college college students, they denounced the shah’s need to Westernize Iranian society. The shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was pressured into exile in early 1979. A month earlier than the assault on the embassy, the Carter administration allowed him to enter the USA for medical therapy.
“These Individuals who applauded the Westernizing efforts of the shah had little notion of how his applications had disrupted lives in any respect ranges of society,” Mr. Kennedy wrote in his e book. “Many Iranians, disoriented, pressured to suppose in new and unusual methods, to carry out unfamiliar duties in accordance with unfamiliar norms, humiliated by their inadequacies as they tried to behave as Westerners, and disinclined to change into proximate Westerners, second-class at greatest, sought above all for a renewed sense of their very own identification.”
They discovered it in fundamentalist faith, Mr. Kennedy contended, including: “The taking of American hostages marked the expulsion of the agent of their disorientation. The violence of that expulsion was a measure of the depth and effectiveness of Western penetration.”
Moorhead Cowell Kennedy Jr., who was often known as Mike, was born on Nov. 5, 1930, in Manhattan. His father was a banker and later the president of Goodwill Industries of New York. His mom, Anna (Scott) Kennedy, taught youngsters’s theater.
Mr. Kennedy’s curiosity in politics and the Center East started on the Groton College, a boarding faculty in Massachusetts. He then went to Princeton, the place he majored in Asian research and graduated in 1952.
He realized Arabic at a language faculty within the mountains of Lebanon. At Harvard Regulation College, his thesis on Islamic regulation was later condensed and printed in Collier’s Encyclopedia. He graduated from Harvard in 1959 and joined the Overseas Service the subsequent yr.
Mr. Kennedy was posted in Yemen, Greece, Lebanon and Chile earlier than his short-term project in Tehran. After his launch, he rode with Mayor Edward I. Koch in a ticker-tape parade by way of Decrease Manhattan. He retired from the Overseas Service shortly after and based the Cathedral Peace Institute on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.
The institute later grew to become the Council for Worldwide Understanding, which used role-playing to show diplomacy to highschool college students.
Mr. Kennedy married Louisa Livingston in 1955. She died in 2007. His companion, Ellen Kappes, died in 2022. He lived for a few years on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
Along with his son Mark, he’s survived by three different sons, Philip, Andrew and Duncan Kennedy; a sister, Maisie Adamson; and 10 grandchildren.
Writing in “The Ayatollah within the Cathedral,” Mr. Kennedy marveled at how naïve he had been in regards to the assault that the Marine had introduced within the hallway.
That afternoon, he was imagined to have had lunch with an Iranian banker.
“How might I make lunch?” he wrote. “With the telephones tied up, how might I get phrase to him?”
Shortly after, he was blindfolded and tied to a chair.
